Right now I'm helping an insurance firm in London figure out how to deploy their code quickly and reliably without getting large numbers of people out of bed in the middle of the night.

Before this I was at Global Radio in Reading, having fun with AWS and some frankly strange quadratic equations. Previously I was with Nokia Entertainment in Bristol, optimising how music files are ingested and transcoded.

And before that, amongst other things, I was the Product Marketing Manager in Europe for Borland Delphi.

What's the most economical way to remove a wood stove?Sounds harsh -- can you have a surveyor prove that it's a reasonable distance from non-combustible materials? Alternatively, can you negotiate an exclusion on the policy? With the price of fuel, a woodstove is really quite an economical option...

Fast, easy and simple construction of a log storeAnd that is indeed what I used to rather good effect. Rather than use pallets, I used six-foot fence panels, and a rough-and-ready pitched roof made of OSB3 board with roofing felt over. The floor is made of treated boards a foot or so off the ground with an inch gap between them for air. So far, so good -- it's down in the trees so it seems unlikely to blow away unless I'm really unlucky.

How should I prepare damaged plaster for painting?Plaster is cheap, it's the labour that costs. My work was for a hall, not a stairwell, which is much harder to get to - your plasterer will most likely be spending most of his time putting up an access platform, then moving it! £400 sounds on the steep side but not out of the question, so yes, keep looking...

Should I hire an architect to design my house?@ChrisF - actually not true, but you'll have a /much/ easier time of it in the UK if you /do/ have an architect or draughtsman draw up plans. If the work is simple and obvious a planning committee will generally be fine with plans drawn up by a householder.